London's data-king Kulveer Ranger on the challenges of open data

Public service providers are struggling to balance a commitment
to open data with a duty to protect personal data and privacy,
according to Kulveer Ranger, Digital Director of London.

"People have always been scared when they give their data over
to big organisations about what they'll know about them or do with
the information. The institutions responded by saying 'we won't do
anything with it. We'll lock it up and throw away the key. And
there was some kind of transactions saying that your data is safe
with us. Now individuals are saying 'free my data' and institutions
are confused because they had a pact to protect the data."

Ranger worked on implementing the Oyster Card between 2000 and
2003 and said that one of the main public concerns was that TFL would be able to track people on a minute by minute basis
and that their data would need to be protected. "But within seven
or eight years now people want that access and want to see the
data. TFL now has to look at what they thought was the right thing
and find out how to move things on."

Ranger adds: "I think it's inevitable that the majority of data
will be open and that the individual will be able to choose to let
their data be available and handle the risk and responsibility
associated with that."

Ranger was appointed by Boris Johnson as Environment and
Director of Environment and Digital London in April this year,
following three years of working as the Mayor's transport advisor.
One of his core areas of focus has been open data. He told
Wired.co.uk: "Open data is absolutely core to what we do. There was
a huge political debate about transparency when we first came into
administration in 2008. That transparency debate led to a
conversation about data and the power of it if you let it become
free."

In January 2010, Johnson set up the London Data Store,
hosting hundreds of sets of data about the capital as a means
to encourage people to create apps and maps and boost the city's
transparency and accountability. Ranger is "keen to push that much
further to make more data available". He brought about collaboration between the Greater London Authority, the
Environment Agency, Natural England and the Forestry Commission to
publish a "Green datastore" covering a wide range of environmental
statistics.

He believes that open data has a clear economic benefit and
drives innovation. He cites the release of the Boris bike data as a textbook example of this, because
developers helped to make it easier for people to find docking
stations. "One of the key challenges for any of these cycle hire
schemes is re-distribution and they started doing it for us. It
made the case to the GLA and TFL to show how much open data can
help organizations and members of the public."

He explains that external developers are much better placed to
build apps using the data. He says: "Government and administrations
aren't good at making apps. It's like government websites - they
never quite hit the mark, probably because the talent for that sort
of thing doesn't naturally find a home in government."